Kenitra Military Air Base, a former U.S. Naval Air Station, provided the exterior location for scenes set at Saddam International Airport.  The visual effects team completed the transformation of Moroccan locations into Iraqi landmarks, including the airport, Republican Palace and Assassins’ Gate.

With fewer iconic locations, Rabat was appropriately atmospheric. "Rabat was chosen because it best resembled parts of Baghdad," says VFX supervisor Peter Chiang. "The architecture and flat roofs provided a good foundation for our needs."

Night shooting in Salé provoked further déjà vu for Chandrasekaran.  Says the journalist: "It looked and felt like a hard-scrabble part of Adhamiya, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood on the eastern side of the Tigris River."

Salé also accommodated the dust and din of three Special Forces helicopters swooping in and out of a woebegone football pitch (soccer field). The helicopter of choice for Briggs and his men would be the Black Hawk, but ongoing military needs made Black Hawks unavailable. 

The Huey, a staple of the Vietnam War, most closely resembles the Black Hawk’s shape.  Therefore, three Hueys were filmed and transformed into Black Hawks during postproduction.

Not every day in Morocco was so gritty.  For several days and nights, an upscale area of Salé depicted Baghdad’s Mansour district, also known as 'the Beverly Hills of Baghdad.'

Production moved to its London base in mid-March and availed itself of a wide variety of locations. Most of the film’s interiors were shot in the London area and in the neighboring county of Surrey. 

Scenes set in the grand rooms of the Republican Palace were filmed at Freemasons’ Hall, an imposing Art Deco landmark on Great Queen Street in London’s Covent Garden. The indoor betting parlor at Sandown Park Racecourse in Surrey underwent a metamorphosis to portray the interior of Saddam International Airport, which was transformed when Coalition Forces set up camp there in 2003. 

Updown Court, a never-occupied luxury manor house in Surrey, stood in for a ravaged Green Zone palace, where Miller and the MET D briefly lodged.  Green Zone filmed at the Renaissance Hotel, steps away from Heathrow International Airport’s infamous Terminal 5, on the very day that the new terminal so disastrously opened.

Huge construction sheds at QinetiQ, a former tank factory in Surrey, housed another would-be WMD site and a Camp Cropper prison. 

The interior of General Al-Rawi’s house, mounted on a ton of pneumatically inflated bellows by the special effects team, was also built at QinetiQ.  The bellows’ heaving gave the set a violent shake, simulating the effect of bombs falling in the near distance.

Saddam’s long-rumored maze of underground tunnels and bunkers, also alleged to be rife with hidden weapons, inspired the setting for a climactic firefight in Green Zone. 

The desolate Millennium Mills site in East London’s Docklands was chosen for the sequence. "We researched the tactics Iraqi soldiers would be geared up for, if attacked somewhere like a safe house," offers stunt coordinator Markos Rounthwaite. 

"They would know the place like the backs of their hands, and U.S. troops wouldn’t know where to start chasing them."

Green Zone is out now.

Tagged in